The Brooklyn-based design collective, BlackSpace, is a group of design professionals working across disciplines to reform the way that designers bring about tangible, community-based change. BlackSpace, spearheaded by urbanists Emma Osore and Kenyatta McLean, operates across the northeast as a nonprofit design collective in urban planning and design, architecture, real estate, and the arts.
After joining forces at the 2015 Harvard GSD’s Black in Design Conference (BiD), the founders of the collective began to discuss a new pedagogical approach against extractive planning and design methods that often have inflicted harm on BIPOC communities. BlackSpace, from its origin, has worked to center black joy through liberatory design and business practices, while simultaneously always trying to “move at the speed of trust.”
Keren Dillard sat down with Osore and McLean to learn more about the recent ribbon cutting of their first built project, the Brownsville Heritage House Reading Room.
Keren Dillard (KD): How did you begin working with Brownsville Heritage House on the Reading Room?
BlackSpace: The Brownsville Heritage House is our biggest neighborhood strategy project. These projects are done with Black-led, community-based organizations, and this partnership came from another project called Black Spaces Brownsville where BlackSpace and Brownsville Heritage House (BHH) collaborated to create a heritage conservation playbook. We learned a lot about what it means to focus on the folks that have done work toward the heritage of space, and that’s how we were able to begin work with Mariam Robertson, executive director of BHH and leader of the Brownsville Cultural Coalition.
KD: What does reformation in community approach look like in real-time? How do you choose to move with intention when working with community partners like BHH?
BlackSpace: One of the things that we needed to do to get to construction was move some of the artifacts out of the space. On that day there were a lot of things taken out, and it was actually very emotional. It was very fast, and not in a way that paid attention to all of the emotions that were happening, but at the same time, the project needed to move forward, and we couldn’t stop at every single object. So, it was a real tension point in, like, how do we move the physical project forward while maintaining relationship and integrity and moving at the speed of trust with our clients?
We move in the way of our manifesto as our ethos of care for community. Both for the big vision of the project, as well as for the individual moments that might not have been something grand.
The BlackSpace Manifesto is defined through 14 pedagogical principles:
- Create Circles, Not Lines
- Choose Critical Connections Over Critical Mass
- Move at the Speed of Trust
- Be Humble Learners Who Practice Deep Listening
- Celebrate, Catalyze, & Amplify Black Joy
- Plan With, Design With
- Center Lived Experience
- Seek People at the Margins
- Reckon with the Past to Build the Future
- Protect & Strengthen Culture
- Cultivate Wealth
- Foster Personal & Communal Evolution
- Promote Excellence
- Manifest the Future
KD: With the understanding of the centrality of this manifesto in your work, where do you find power in using the manifesto to work through your neighborhood strategy projects?
BlackSpace: Our manifesto introduces what we think about social change or how we think the world should work. So the 14 principles are a good understanding of what values we believe are important when working with each other on teams and then, also, when working in the community with organizations or communities that might be having an urban planning or urban design project that they want to engage with. Things like creating circles, not lines, speak to our interest in nonhierarchical systems or recognizing that we’ve still found hierarchy within our own collective. We are always trying to lean away from it and get closer to creating more collaborative spaces where people can create autonomously and also where people can co-lead. We like to operate as an amoeba rather than a pyramid.
KD: In your pedagogical approach, how do you see social change, and how does that guide the way that you understand collaboration?
BlackSpace: A lot of times it’s seen as we—the urban planners, the architects, the designers, the artists—are the experts. It’s not recognized that a lot of people’s lived experiences, which speaks to another principle of centered lived experience, are also expertise. That is why it has been really important to us to center around these different principles because they bring to life this idea of just literally changing how you interact with each other, and changing how you interact in projects.
We are always trying to create more collaborative spaces where people can create autonomously but also co-lead. An organization like ours can sense those kinds of things, make the changes, and keep a project moving forward.”
KD: What’s next for BlackSpace?
BlackSpace: This upcoming year will be our tenth year organizing, so that is an important milestone. Since BlackSpace organically started in 2015 and became a nonprofit in 2019, we’ve focused on building the capacities of individuals and organizations interested in centering their urbanist projects and practices around Black liberation and joy. There is a lot more that actually needs to happen in terms of how we continue demonstrating what the possibilities are in our fields, so we are excited to think about what it might look like going forward to sustain new ideas that allow for flexibility for healing and re-centering.
As we continue to evolve, we are working to leverage our design knowledge, grounded by our manifesto, to spark local discussions and action spaces that inspire creative networks engaged with local and historical Black cultural heritage. We are excited to share new programming aimed at enhancing the creative autonomy of Black urbanists in the fall.
Keren Dillard is an architectural designer, writer, and researcher from Yonkers, New York.
